Comments

Has anybody been using Connections at all (and liking it)?

Each time I looked at it (e.g. using my Greenhouse account) I found it rather useless: I believe that typical IBM customers and social networks don't fit. The first are almost always hierarchical organisations, social networks are flat. In the first, what you post or comment will potentially read by your manager, could be good or bad for your career, in the second it is simply up to you. Last not least if I run across something interesting, I will share it in the (single) social network I use every day. I usually won't duplicate it for my 'work network'.

In my opinion social networks can be an inspiration for things people do at work and how they do them, but simply imitating them for that context is a mistake.

Connections has always looked overloaded and confusing to me. It looks like a rather uninspired collection of practically all elements of any relevance that have come up in the context of social networks in the last years. There is no individuality and vision to see behind IBM's product. Hence: it does not look particularly well done to me.

@martin: We use connections and we like it :-) Until now only within the IT-Dept. to get rid off the very, very, very old KnowHow-Databases. But there are tendencies to go "global". So maybe, in the not to distant future, we'll go enterprise-wide.

I personally think that connections was THE best idea/product, IBM had for a long time. Of course, there's still a lot to do around the product but i think they are on a good way.

This brings me to greenhouse...

... it's quite simple: without greenhouse we would not have connections in our enterprise. I "played" a lot on greenhouse. Tried things out to become familiar with the features. Sneak around, dig in some of the communities. It is a great place to find out, what's possible and to invite co-workers, to look for themselves.

IMHO IBM is making a huge mistake if the're shutting down this sites one after another. But there are sure a few highly intelligent "experts on everything" who know, what they're doing [/sarcasm].

I'm not going to tell anyone not to use it, just sharing my experience - having worked on a project in that field and having also had to deal with Connections. The first problem I mentioned above has its roots in an enterprise's culture which will of course differ from enterprise to enterprise, the second has of course a lot to do with my (individual) perception.

Let's not forget that Stuart works for IBM Connections fiercest competitor now ;-)

That being said, Jive's customer community is actually a pretty good example of a successful customer community, as they do use it for most customer interactions (support, KB, developers, licensing, etc). Something like this for IBM customers, as Volker suggested (maybe segmented in some reasonable way with a centralized profile) would be quite the win for showing off Connections.

I don't know which one is going to win out Stuart ... but from what I understand its a single Connections instance for partners, ibmers, and customers that faces externally inside a login. I believe the w3 implementation will be seperate.